23/09/2026
On Kawara
Conceptual artist On Kawara’s works’ have a formal simplicity that belies their almost black-hole-magntitude of existential depth.
Kawara himself enlists the cosmic scale when subtitling one of his Date Paintings (DEC. 31, 1966):
To make a hole in a day as a nap
To travel down that hole to the Big Bang
To wake up as if for the first time
At one with the Universe
This series of works, alongside “I Got Up”, “I Went”, “I Met”, and most clearly, “I am Still Alive”, acts as an ongoing proof of life. Kawara catalogued not only the time, the date, his movements, and the people with whom he spent time, but also dates and times spanning millions of years, as a tribute to all those who lived or will live through those periods.
An artist who understood the brilliance of surface simplicity and brevity, and the boundless depths that can, ironically, be plumbed therein, he captures like no other the spirit of the vignette, the passage, the eternality of the fleeting moment.
NB: Images are of Kawara’s works in the homes of collectors by Candida Höfer.
